More on Mowing

I thought I would say a bit more about the ways in which Robert Frost turns the sonnet form to his advantage in “Mowing”. I neglected to mention, in my initial thoughts, an intriguing way in which Frost plays off reader’s expectations in the final two lines. This feature of the poem is worthy of discussion.

The Shakespearian sonnet ends with a heroic couplet, which, properly executed, makes for a pithy, punchy finale. It invites the poet to condense the first twelve lines into a moral, often of a satirical nature. The couplet is ripe for generalizing but, even if particular, it still has the feeling of a punchline, as in these lines from Shakespeare’s first sonnet:

Pity the world, or else this glutton be,
To eat the world’s due, by the grave and thee.

“Mowing” simultaneously has and lacks a couplet. The rhyme scheme of the final two lines is FG, so it is not a true heroic couplet. Nonetheless, the first twelve lines consist of two sentences of six lines apiece, while each of the final two lines is a sentence of its own. There is thus the trace of the couplet structure. Moreover, line thirteen has the feel of a Shakespearian couplet: “The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.” Here is the moral to be drawn from all that came above, and we await its completion in the following line.

This expectation is frustrated, however, for the next line drops us back into the scene of mowing as it draws to a close. The scythe finishes its whisper and leaves the hay to make. The lack of rhyme (within the couplet, I mean) only enhances this disconnect. This is the masterstroke that makes the poem, for Frost with this move takes us out of the general and back to the particular, back to the fact just praised. The poem does not reward us with intellectual contentment of an empty sort (now I have grasped the point; I may be done here). It forces us to embody its moral if we are to enjoy it. At the same time, the narrator is further effaced, for the generality of line thirteen is a contribution of the narrator and not of the scythe, and in that regard is something extraneous.